Chapter 3: Smart Tourism: Risks, Opportunities, and Challenges Available to Purchase

The turn of the 20th century has brought new challenges and risks for the tourism industry. The recent COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of AI (artificial intelligence) and augmented reality as new forms of relationships. Of course, tourism is not an exception. The industry has recently experienced a set of radical shifts (because of digital technology) that include the recruitment of robots for help-desk duties at hotels, virtual tours, or tourism, and the adoption of new protocols to reduce tourism and pollution (only to name a few). Smart tourism has come to stay in academia. In this debate, the present book chapter discusses critically the opportunities, risks, and challenges of smart tourism. The chapter rests on Naisbitt’s paradox which says overtly that the bigger the system, the more powerful its small players. Smart tourism is creating opportunities to make global businesses but with some risks to consumers’ data privacy. Digital technologies are expanding the industry blurring the inter-class inequalities while paradoxically giving local stakeholders more independence. As a result of this, nation-states go through serious difficulties in regulating smart tourism. The lack of an applicable legal background ushers small firms into some bad/unethical/practices.